San Diego Chargers show the NFL how to beat Chip Kelly and the Philadelphia Eagles

If Chip Kelly can turn an NFL offense into a Frankenstein monster, the San Diego Chargers showed the league one kind of antidote in Sunday's entertaining 33-30 donnybrook won by the visitors in the Philadelphia Eagles' home opener at Lincoln Financial Field.

OVERALL: A game the Birds should have won, but attention to detail needed. Grade: C.

Not that first-year coach Mike McCoy's team stopped, or even slowed down, Kelly's attack much. The Eagles piled up 511 total yards, with Michael Vick throwing for a career-high 428 yards and wide receiver DeSean Jackson posting his second-best career yardage day at 193 and a career high in receptions with nine.

As Eagles linebacker DeMeco Ryans put it, "Your offense scores 30 points, it did enough for us to win."

What San Diego did was show how to manage, if not control, the Birds. Jam the box to limit LeSean McCoy, whose yardage total plummeted from 184 in last week's win over Washington to 53 Sunday. Run the ball well enough (126 yards) to play some ball control and get the tough third downs against a 3-4 line.

And most of all, keep the Eagles' offense where it's harmless -- standing on the sideline -- with long drives and intelligent clock management.

The Chargers piled up 40 minutes of time of possession to the Eagles' 19. Doing that allowed San Diego's defense to get some rest and limited Vick's opportunities.

"I think that was important ... (and) one of the keys to the game," said McCoy, who picked up his first win Sunday. "You have to play complementary football ... the offense maintaining drives, not going 3-and-out, keeping the defense off the field. I think (we) did a good job of that."

San Diego also did a good job of making its time edge count on the scoreboard.

"I think keeping them off the field is important only if you're scoring," said Chargers' quarterback Philip Rivers, who torched an often inept and impotent Eagles defense for 413 yards and three TDs on 36-for-47 passing and a 124.3 quarterback rating. "The name of the game is scoring. If you can do 12 plays and score touchdowns, we'd love to do that against this defense to keep their offense off the field."

Rivers pretty much described what happened, and it would have been even more so had San Diego not lost two fumbles inside the Eagles' 10-yard line. The Chargers' scoring drives went like this, with plays and minutes: 8/4:25, 11/6:23, 7/3:37, 11/4:56, 17/8:55, 7/3:55 and 9/1:44 (the game-winning field goal). San Diego ran the play clock down at every opportunity and moved with the speed of a torpid, well-fed python all afternoon.

By contrast the Eagles' longest possession lasted 3:41.

"We couldn't get them off the field," said an exasperated Kelly, in unquestionably his worst mood in a news conference since taking over in January. "We have to generate better pressure and we couldn't cover well enough on third down."

The frustration for Kelly came in large part from the fact the Birds generated one sack against Rivers, who's about as mobile as an anvil atop an anchor and isn't protected by a Hall of Fame line (all you need to know there is that Birds reject King Dunlap starts at left tackle).

The Birds couldn't get near Rivers with a three-man rush. "The bigger plays, which we tried to avoid, came when we had three-man rushes," Eagles' defensive coordinator Bill Davis said.

But when the Eagles blitzed, it left Charger receivers such as All-Pro tight end Antonio Gates, halfback Danny Woodhead and wideout Eddie Royal (23 combined receptions) to expose the inability of the Birds' linebackers, cornerbacks and especially safeties to make the most elementary of plays. Linebacker Mychal Kendricks had not a chance to contain Gates (124 yards) even when Kendricks was near him (not often); cornerback Cary Williams was flagged three times for pass interference, and Nate Allen, Patrick Chung and rookie Earl Wolff looked more like The Three Stooges than The Three Safeties.

Better get used to it, Eagles fans.

"There aren't any safeties on the street, I can tell you that," Kelly said. "You're not going to find anybody on the street corner that's going to be able to play safety for you. ... We've got to coach them better and put them in position to make plays. We've got to make sure we put a game plan together so they understand it."

San Diego put a game plan together that kept Kelly's offense off the field, exploited Kelly's defense and allowed the Chargers to win 3,000 miles from home.

You can bet the rest of the NFL will understand that, how to beat Chip Kelly and the Eagles, just fine. Now it's up to Kelly, the league's mad scientist, to conjure up an antidote for the antidote.